I cannot follow you, I hand a rgba value to the function that holds the base color of the text.
whats wrong with it??
I thought a vbo whose vertics color alpha value is 255 can never be transparent, no matter who the lightning or material setup is....wrong???

How can I know if you have defined a vertex color array that sets the vertices color values when rendering? I know nothing about your VBO setup, I know nothing about state settings you have done at init time or somewhere else, I know nothing about how you render vertex data and I know nothing about what what color values you pass to glColor4ubv.

So, tell me, how am I supposed to help you if you won't even supply me with information I'm specifically asking for?

All I can deduce is that you probably have blending enabled, maybe have not specified a vertex color array and that you don't reset the the state of GL_CURRENT_COLOR to whatever value it's supposed to have after glColor4ubv...

My vbos keep koordinates, normals and colors for each Vertex - no textures.
There is no need to specify any color, if I want a different I modify the color fileds of the vbo vertices.
The display lists as delivered from wgl... hold only polygon vertics - so the color must be defined external.
Sorry if my description was incomplete.
Hope this helps - somehow the execution of the lists changes the opengl state - as I told you before the first frame is ok,
on the second frame the vbo color is transparent.
If I only work with vbos everything works perfect.
Maybe I should define the characters as vbos.

Yes, that's definitely possible. However, they would have to enable GL_BLEND for blending to happen - unless you don't enable it somewhere else yourself. And even if it was enabled, if you have a valid color array used when rendering with correctly setup VBO, color state should be pulled from the VBOs. Please post your VBO and array (gl*Pointer() ) setup code and Draw_VBO().

I use 3 function for every primitive - example here ( I cut out the other planes ) VBO_Quad -> creates the data in the machines memory
Upload_VBO transfers everything to GPU memory
Draw_VBO displays it

Maybe it's just me, but other than finding your code extremely hard to read, I'm not yet able to see how your complete data is put into the VBO data store. Aside from that, if your data is all in one buffer, I doubt that a single vbo->stride argument will suffice because it looks to me as if you try to interleave your data and thus a single stride parameter cannot be appropriate. Please post the definitions of: